This has a greater chance of being true than the "ending" of the Mayan calendar and the destruction of the world this December. Then again, The spacecraft might finish traversing the termination shockwave just about then...

This has a greater chance of being true than the "ending" of the Mayan calendar and the destruction of the world this December. Then again, The spacecraft might finish traversing the termination shockwave just about then...

We can combine both. When spacecraft collides with the sphere, the world is destroyed by ancient alien machinery put in place to eliminate any civilizations that try to go to other planets. Mayans have foretold when that was going to happen.

The new region is sort of a magnetic highway, allowing charged particles to more easily zoom out of and into the solar system. This is not interstellar space yet, but an unexpected region that indicates Voyager 1 is even closer to the heliopause. Estimates are a couple months to a couple years before we break through to the other side.

It basically shows that at some point early in the second-half of last year, Voyager 1 passed a point in the outer solar system where high-energy electrons and protons went very high, and low-energy protons dropped to almost nothing (see the chart at the link above). This is what would be expected from the interstellar medium.

However, the Sun's magnetic fields have not changed (not shown), which is another expectation from transitioning over the heliopause into interstellar space.

For now, scientists are saying Voyager 1 passed through the "heliocliff". But whether this new area of space is within or outside of the heliopause or solar system proper is still an open question. It's an interesting question--if 3 of the 4 things you expected to happen when you reached interstellar space have actually happened, but the 4th thing that hasn't changed is fairly significant, did you actually make the transition or not?

The new region is sort of a magnetic highway, allowing charged particles to more easily zoom out of and into the solar system. This is not interstellar space yet, but an unexpected region that indicates Voyager 1 is even closer to the heliopause. Estimates are a couple months to a couple years before we break through to the other side.

The guys in astrophysics are actually having to rethink what the heliopause even is.

Before now, it was thought that the heliopause was sharp, sudden and the Sun's influence would just end like that, over only a few hundreds of thousands of kilometres - no distance at all. The solar wind and magnetosphere would become so weak that they'd be washed away by galactic particle flows and magnetic fields at this tipping point. The magnetic field would reach out further and, like Jupiter's, would tail off in a cometary sort of shape.

Now it looks like the two are not as closely connected as we thought. We didn't think that the solar wind would drop before the magnetosphere, and we had no idea that the magnetosphere out there was "foamy". The heliosheath was meant to be the "other way around" and it was meant to be sort of comet shaped, but IBEX has shown it's more or less spherical.

IBEX and Cassini also showed that the Sun has no bow shock at all, which caused another big re-think of the local ISM.

They say you need to see a change in direction of the magnetic fields of the Sun, which hasn't happened yet.

As Hat Monster says above, I think it's a bit more complicated than that now. Essentially, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is no longer flying through the Solar Wind, but instead is now flying through the Interstellar Wind (or whatever you want to call the area where the particle flow of the galaxy as a whole is greater than that of the Sun). However, the area where Voyager 1 is cruising is still magnetically dominated by the Sun, not interstellar space.

In about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will drift within 1.6 light years (9.3 trillion miles) of AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis. In some 296,000 years, Voyager 2 will pass 4.3 light years (25 trillion miles) from Sirius, the brightest star in the sky . The Voyagers are destined—perhaps eternally—to wander the Milky Way.

Is it wrong of me, that I read that blub in Carl Sagan's voice? - that perhaps eternally is just _so_ him

There's a profile in Nature of Voyager Project Scientist Ed Stone, who has been in charge of Voyager since its inception. It includes this:

Quote:

That includes Stone, who has stuck with Voyager because he is eager for more discoveries. It has been a long wait since Neptune. The team has talked so many times about the impending departure into interstellar space that office doors around mission control are decorated with a photo of a forlorn-looking Voyager with the quote: “Whenever people stop paying attention to me, I pretend to leave the Solar System.”

Whenever I see news about Voyager probes I wonder if there is reason (right now) to purposely design and build a probe that would travel somewhere close (like Alpha Centauri) and send back whatever data possible. Or, even though extreme relative velocity would be a primary mission parameter, would it still be so slow that we're better off waiting "a long time" to see whether or not we find some breakthrough propulsion technology to equip it with.

Whenever I see news about Voyager probes I wonder if there is reason (right now) to purposely design and build a probe that would travel somewhere close (like Alpha Centauri) and send back whatever data possible. Or, even though extreme relative velocity would be a primary mission parameter, would it still be so slow that we're better off waiting "a long time" to see whether or not we find some breakthrough propulsion technology to equip it with.

If the nuclear powered icy moon explorer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Icy_Moons_Orbiter) wouldn't have been nixed, such a mission would have been a reasonable follow-on mission. Alas, nuclear powered ion drive spacecraft are off the table for the foreseeable future, unfortunately.

If the nuclear powered icy moon explorer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Icy_Moons_Orbiter) wouldn't have been nixed, such a mission would have been a reasonable follow-on mission. Alas, nuclear powered ion drive spacecraft are off the table for the foreseeable future, unfortunately.

JIMO-based spacecraft would not be able to get to Alpha Centauri in a reasonable amount of time. There were some plans to design an "interstellar probe" based on the JIMO reactor and ion engine design, but this would have been similar to the TAU mission mentioned earlier, not something for travel to another solar system.

Scientists had begun to vigorously debate Voyager’s whereabouts earlier this year, when it was clear that the probe was being bombarded by an increasing number of galactic cosmic rays and that the number of high-energy particles from inside the heliosphere had plummeted.

However, NASA scientists said they could not be certain Voyager had left the solar system until surrounding magnetic fields changed direction. After waiting for that change for more than a year, however, officials conceded that the magnetic field change was not a necessary indicator.

The >0.5MeV particle readings are primarily anomalous cosmic rays, thought to be generated by pickup ions from neutral interstellar material being ionized closer to the Sun, being carried out by the Sun's magnetic field and gaining energy by repeated collisions with the heliosheath termination shock within the heliopause. So their disappearance would be evidence of moving through the heliopause.